After two years in ManchesterML took a job as a milliner with Briggs and Co. at Newcastle in Staffordshire. She stayed there, living in lodgings, for three years, till she was twenty-three. She then moved from Newcastle to Hawksworth in Nottinghamshire, where she worked as a schoolteacher at the National School run by the local clergyman, the Rev. William Walton Herringham . The only other teacher covered French and music; Mary undertook everything else, and particularly enjoyed teaching drawing. She lost the job, however, when an epidemic of scarlet fever sent most of the boys home and Mr Herringham could no longer afford her wages. Her most recent biographer, Cordelia Stamp, does not support the story that she was a governess in the family of the Rev. Robert Miles , rector of Bingham near Hawksworth, but mentions as her first governess job her post with another clergyman, named Hope, at Derby. Here ML virtually filled the position of mother to six children whose actual mother was an invalid (or, according to Stamp, a hypochondriac). She stayed there till early 1869. This position gave her the opportunity of playing the organ at church on Sundays, and developing her aptitude for flower-painting, in both oil and watercolours. Cordelia Stamp reproduces an oil portrait by her.

Having left school, SM had a number of casual jobs. Most important in the long run was one in an antique shop, which specialised in silver. The shop's owners were the parents of art critic David Sylvester, and its manager was Frank Marcus, a playwright on the brink of discovery and success.

EKM , still a child, spent the first of many summers with her family in their lakeside cottage at Creux de Genthod in Switzerland, and began her love-affair with sailing.

NM 's earliest ambition was to be an artist, and she continued to paint into the 1940s. She was a founding member of the mainly-female Group of Christchurch painters, who intended her training at the Canterbury College School of Art to lay the foundation for a career as a painter. She felt intensely, however, the difficulty of capturing the New Zealand landscape (and, latterly, the activities of those working in it) in a medium evolved in Europe, and she lacked confidence in her own attempts to surmount this difficulty. Julie King and Vickie Hearnshaw reproduce several of her paintings (as well as two paintings of her as an artist) in their essay on this side of her life. Marsh's final statements about the New Zealand landscape, they say, were made in a series of four murals representing the four seasons, done while she worked at Burwood Hospital with wounded soldiers during the second world war (which are now at the Returned Servicemen's Club in Christchurch). Two are reproduced (in black and white) in Margaret Lewis 's biography.

HM came to see the loss of her income, like the loss of her fiancé, as a bracing experience, indeed as one of the most fortunate occurrences of her life. She decided to pursue her literary endeavours wholeheartedly, and to cultivate her mind for the sake of writing to instruct others. She sold a ball-dress, and earned some money doing fancy-work for a time, living on £50 for two years, until she could support herself by her pen alone. W. J. Fox agreed to pay her £15 a year for her reviewing for the The Monthly Repository. Of that period of her life, HM recalled: It was truly life that I lived during those days of strong intellectual and moral effort.

After graduating from highschool, ESVM had a stage success (her first in professional, not amateur theatre) with a travelling stock company. She was offered a continuing job if the company should become permanent, but this did not happen and instead Millay stayed at home caring for her sisters.

LMWM , in Constantinople, had her five-year-old son inoculated against smallpox.

Her father's bankruptcy meant that Sydney had to work as a governess, though he was never comfortable about her doing this.

While still at Oxford , WM began writing poetry with great dedication. He eventually published poems, stories, articles, and a single review (of Robert Browning 's Men and Women) in the periodical he produced with friends, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. The magazine ceased its run in December 1856. At the close of this year, Morris also left the architectural firm to pursue painting; he was persuaded to this shift by his new friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti . Morris's career as a painter was short-lived—he completed only one canvas. He then turned back to writing and published his first poetry collection, The Defence of Guinevere, and Other Poems (1858), to poor reviews. Although begun on a sour note, his authorial career proved to be both prolific and generically diverse.

As an undergraduate IM worked as sub-editor and advertising manager for student publications. In summer 1939 she was one of a troupe of student actors touring Berkshire and Oxfordshire villages with an assortment of dramatic entertainments—a tour that ended as the war began.

Deprived of poetry, no longer working at the Agronomy Institute library, and banned from the bohemian life, Anna developed an interest in Aleksandr Sergeevych Pushkin's works and in architecture; she also translated from French, Italian and English and assisted in writing lectures to help Punin with his work for the Academy of Arts .

MA writes of her first job as a part of her education. At nine in Stamps, Arkansas, she learned the finer touches around the home in a white woman's kitchen, which became my finishing school. She worked hard for weeks, since she pitied her employer, a childless widow whose husband had left two mixed-race daughters when he died. Then Mrs Cullinan, who had been calling her Margaret instead of Marguerite, switched to Mary on the grounds that Margaret was too long. MA succeeded in getting herself fired by dropping and breaking some heirloom family glass.

She was working at the time as a researcher for Kurt Blumenfeld , president of the Zionist Organization .

Educated at Oxford , MA was a school inspector from 1851 to 1886 and remained dedicated to the improvement of the English educational system throughout his life. He began publishing first as a poet, but became increasingly uncomfortable with verse in an age he felt was hostile to it. He became prominent as both an essayist and a critic, writing widely and influentially on education, literature, English culture, and social issues.

In England in the 1930s WHA worked as a private tutor and as a master at successive boys' prep schools (teaching pupils of up to thirteen). In 1935 he ceased to be a teacher and moved to being a freelance writer, via a period working for the General Post Office Film Unit (which, directed by John Grierson , was breaking new ground in documentary).

SA gave language lessons and became a translator in order to supplement the insecure family income.

There was a tradition that Anne also shared with her father the tutoring of the young king Edward VI.

BB was, she said, a tap-dancing member of Miss Thelma Broadbent 's Ensemble in Southport as a small child. At twelve she was recruited by the BBC to work as a young broadcaster on Children's Hour at their Manchester studios: she first went on air at fourteen, in April 1947. Having left school at fifteen, and after trying a variety act with a friend, she became an actress, employed from July 1949 by Liverpool Repertory Company , managed by the redoubtable Maud Carpenter . She had her first big break playing a schoolboy maths prodigy. She also ensconced herself in a bedsitter in Abercrombie Square, Liverpool, from which her father dragged her back home. After moving to London she worked as a cinema usherette until she got her first acting job in the capital in May 1952, which she followed a few months later with an engagement at Dundee in Scotland, where a Liverpool acquaintance gave her a part with the Dundee Repertory Company When, shortly afterwards, the company went through an acrimonious crisis, BB got work with Windsor Repertory . She acted in several other provincial towns, but was finding little work by the time she got married, and even less afterwards (a couple of parts on stage and a couple on the radio in 1961). She said later that she never really wanted to act.

They were barely able to support themselves by needlework.

One of her occupations here was making portrait silhouettes of friends, Warrington citizens, and staff and students at the Academy . More than fifty are known. To some silhouettes she added appropriate mottoes, quotations, or sometimes her own poetry.

After her dramatic training Daisy Jervis worked on the stage, but with no real success. She gave a concert on her own, had one job as a dancer (at two pounds a week), lost another offer because her languages were not good enough for a foreign tour, and embarked on journalism instead. She found it much easier to make a living by her pen, even when her father insisted on her leaving London to live with her parents again, far from the city. She went on seeking stage jobs, and met Gladys Cooper , who was doing the same thing. She says (though her dates are always unreliable) that she left the stage at seventeen after the glory of playing with Ellen Terry in the great actress's final season at Her Majesty's Theatre . The question of her possible but still precarious existence as a writer then merged with the issue of her marital future.

As a child PB helped in her grandparents' fish-and-chip shop. After leaving school she taught for a year in a Stockton infants' school.